I Can Put My Arms Around Every Boy I See
by Kshar
Summary: This has nothing to do with her father.


I Can Put My Arms Around Every Boy I See

by Kshar

Summary: This has nothing to do with her father.

Warnings: Sexual references. Adult themes. Emily.

Disclaimer: Characters from the television show "Jericho" are the property of CBS Paramount, and are used without permission. Title is a lyric from the song, 'Nothing Compares 2 U', property of Prince Rogers Nelson, and is used without permission.

xx

On the morning they went to war, on the day after she saw her father shoot a man point-blank in the face, Emily combed out her hair carefully and tied it back, and then started to apply her makeup. She hadn't gotten much sleep, and she had a couple of little scratches on her cheeks from flying glass, so she covered the dark circles under her eyes and smoothed concealer over broken skin. Base and just a touch of rouge, and gloss today instead of lipstick.

That was something she and Heather had argued about once. Heather said lip gloss was easier because you could apply it in a second, without having to excuse yourself. Emily said that part of being a lady was excusing yourself to the powder room sometimes, giving you a chance to compose your thoughts and reapply your mask.

Heather just laughed and said that in that case, she was very glad she wasn't a lady.

"I don't think anyone would mistake you for one," Emily had said, looking at Heather's hands with their square-cut nails and the faintest patina of grime that people who worked with cars and oil and seven-year-olds and finger paints could never completely wash off.

She'd meant it as a joke, as something light and funny to say, but Heather looked stung for a moment and changed the subject.

Now, today, Emily regrets that moment.

xx

She and Roger used to like reading about the Civil War, and she'd steal tidbits from the biographies Roger read to tell to her class, to try and get them interested in history. There were women in combat in the Civil War, she knew about them. She'd read the stories and told her class.

They had never seemed real to her, though. Reading them was like watching someone through a window: you could see what they were doing, but you weren't involved. Reading stories doesn't tell you how you get up in the morning knowing that people from your hometown; your friends and neighbors, your high school sweetheart might die today; that it looks likely.

Reading stories doesn't tell you how you should dress if you know you'll likely be covered in blood. Or how to make sure none of it's your own. If you're damn careful and damn lucky, none of it will be your own.

Emily's always been damn careful.

xx

In her bathroom, she poured water from a pitcher into a bowl and washed her hands. She soaped them carefully, with the pretty guest soap that was all she had left. The soap was shaped like a flower and smelled like apple and vanilla, which made no sense. Her stomach rumbled when she caught the scent and she told it to be quiet. When you live alone you can talk to your own stomach.

She sang Yankee Doodle Dandy as she lathered up and rubbed her hands together, as she always had, as far back as she could remember. She wondered who had taught her to do that. Probably her mama. Her dad never really had the time to teach a little girl how to wash her hands.

The wallpaper in her bathroom was old-fashioned-looking and covered with climbing roses. It was a surprise after the rest of the house, and she'd picked it deliberately. Roger had hated it, but bowed to her choice, as always. She'd told him it was the new height of fashion, but in fact she'd just liked it. It looked like something her mother would have chosen. It looked like something Emily would have liked when she was a little girl.

xx

She'd been on alert all the time in this big, empty house. People were all talking about the rise in crime. It was strange, after spending all her life in a Jericho where she barely needed to lock her doors, to be worried all the time about someone breaking into her safe place.

Jake had said she should have gotten someone to stay with her. She'd said something sharp back to him and he'd looked bothered but dropped the subject.

But Jake didn't understand. Here she could still open the bottle of Roger's aftershave when she felt like it, and breathe him in. Musky-dusty like fresh turned earth.

The day he'd come back she'd buried her face in the soft, dirty patch of skin between his neck and his collarbone, and breathed him in. He'd smelled like old sweat and mold and dried blood, and his new beard scratched the side of her face, and she'd cried because he was at once so different and so familiar.

In the days after he came back she spent a lot of time sitting in the chair by the window, watching him sleep and listening to him breathe and thinking about how she'd gotten what she wanted and wondering what to do now.

So, no, she wasn't going to get someone to stay with her, and she wasn't going to move out. Here she didn't have to worry about what anyone else would think, and here she could lie in bed and watch the morning light stream in the window, and remember that night, too, ends.

xx

When Chris was little; when she and Chris were little, she'd tripped him over once for his ice-cream. They'd gone into town clutching coins in their fingers and Chris had spent what seemed like hours deliberating and Miss Gracie had gotten annoyed with them hanging around.

Which they were used to, being the Prowse kids, whom no-one ever wanted hanging around.

When they were walking home she'd suddenly realized that Chris's vanilla ice cream was far, far superior to her own popsicle. Almost without thinking, she'd walked a little slower than him and then almost without thinking, hooked his foot with her own and he'd gone down like a sack of potatoes.

And she'd "rescued" his ice cream for him, of course, and held it for him, and helpfully licked away the melting bits while he'd examined his knees and cried a bit and then scrubbed at his face with one sleeve, leaving little trails of dirt below his red eyes. There was very little ice cream left by the time he'd been ready to get up, and when she held what was left of it out to him he waved it away dismissively, looking suddenly much older.

Another regret, chalk up another one.

xx

Her lip gloss smelled sweet and fruity. Perhaps that was wrong, perhaps you shouldn't smell like that on a day like today. She wasn't sure.

Jake barely looked at her today; he'd always been able to block her out while he focused on other things. Everyone here is in green or gray or brown; camouflage colors. They blend in with their surroundings like they're all one. She'd worn a hooded shirt so she could cover her hair if need be, and a jacket in the same colors as everyone else.

She carried the rifle Jake gave her yesterday, a few hours ago, a few million hours ago. She hadn't gone home until the early hours, and then she'd caught an hour's ragged sleep and woken up with a start. And put on her makeup.

She's handled a gun before, lots of times. She's her father's daughter after all.

She used to go shooting rats with her dad, in what now seems like someone else's childhood. She'd worn her hair in pigtails and taken the sweatshirt with her that her Mama had made for her, that was made out of patchwork leftovers and that she loved so much she wore until it was rags.

The gun in her hand smells like grease and metal, like her dad smells, like Heather used to smell when she'd been out working on her truck, like Chris's hands used to smell sometimes when he came home and she'd worried because Chris hadn't been working on a truck.

xx

Her mother had been talking once when she was small, and she'd said something that Emily had never forgotten. She'd said "A woman should always be able to take care of herself," and then she'd sighed and looked tired.

Emily agreed, as she more-or-less agreed with everything her mother had told her. One should always have a Plan B. Improvisation should always be an option. And money might not buy happiness, but it could buy you a big house in The Pines, and the option to be left alone.

xx

She sat in the back of someone's ancient truck on the way out to the Richmond place, squished against everyone else. It was like something from a movie, one of the action movies she and Roger and Heather used to watch a million years ago before all of this. Someone's elbow was in her ribs the whole way and she felt a little bit sick, but she thought that was probably from hunger.

xx

She misses, of all things, her iPod. She misses putting on her headphones and blocking out the world. Even when Roger was working down the hallway, tapping away at keys and making worried, then angry, then congratulatory phonecalls, she'd always liked having a way to be alone and not alone. She'd always liked a big, sweeping love song, a tearjerker. They made her feel like she was feeling something.

These last few years she's been getting into country music. They play it at high school football games and it reminds her, now, of cold nights and corn dogs and passionate kisses.

Chris always liked country. When she'd had to go and pick up his car because the jerk who had been his landlord was threatening to have it towed away, and there wasn't anyone else to move it, there'd been a country tape in the deck. She'd listened to those hillbilly songs all the way into town. She'd felt a chasm open up in her chest and she'd cried like a baby, hiccoughing and wailing, her makeup running down her face, her tears making the road ahead of her a blur.

xx

When Roger came back, that night he came back, it was like she was walking through a thick-fog dream. She'd given up, by then, and seeing him again was something of a shock, like seeing a ghost.

When they'd finally gone home, and he'd cleaned himself up, they'd had comforting, warm, remembering sex, and she'd kept saying his name gently, softly, under her breath.

He'd slept, and her brain had gone into overdrive, so she went and sat up; covered herself with a blanket and read a book while she watched over him. She'd been useful today and she was happy.

xx

None of them knew what was going on, not truly, except for maybe Johnston and Jake. She couldn't even contemplate approaching Jake's dad, and she was a little afraid to press Jake. She figured that the troops rarely know the plan in any war, but she wanted to be more than a footsoldier, more than cannon fodder. Still she stayed away from Jake and didn't push.

She wonders if maybe this is growing up, because when they were younger she would have hounded him until she knew everything he knew, and he would tell her because he loved her, and then he'd be angry at himself and she'd think she should have left him alone, but she never seemed to learn, and there was always this big chasm in her chest waiting, waiting, for someone who would finally make it all be okay.

Jake's always been angry, a walking ball of hate. It scares her a little but at the same time she thinks it's kind of sexy; she provokes him, sometimes, to see him lose it.

They say women choose men who remind them of their fathers.

xx

That night, late that night, Jake bit her shoulder hard enough that she knew it would leave a bruise and she had to pretend not to see the tears in his eyes, so she didn't look too hard at him.

Which was okay, because he didn't really look at her at all.

We all become adults when our parents die, and she didn't think Jake should have had to go through this particularly painful birthing all by himself, so she offered what she had, what she always had.

His hands were callused with work these days and faintly lined with ingrained dirt. He still had his father's blood beneath his fingernails. She'd thought of pointing that out and then thought again.

He was different from Roger, he moved differently on the bed and he was angular where Roger was solid. She felt guilty for a moment, thinking of Roger at a time like this, but there were so many of both of their ghosts in here it was like she could barely see Jake anyway. It was like her body was with him but her mind was miles away.

Chris. Roger. Now, Heather. Now, Johnston.

He put his blood-stained fingers inside her and made her shriek and giggle into his shoulder, and his expression didn't change. She pressed her closed eyes against his shoulder until she saw gold stars against the black. The blood today, out at the Richmond place; it had smelled sweet as the shiny gloss on her lips.

When they talked afterwards, or rather when she murmured comforting nothings and he answered in broken syllables, she noticed that he still wasn't looking straight at her, but rather off to the side, behind her head, as if he saw the ghosts too. As if he saw them there in the moonlight, their bodies as flimsy as old photograph negatives, watching and listening and never answering. Heather's eyes not accusing but sad, a little bit stung. Chris who didn't take as much shape anymore, but still smelled like he did when he was a little boy, like dust and vanilla ice cream. She wouldn't look directly at Roger, not tonight.

After they talked, Jake rolled over and went to sleep. She'd known that he wouldn't want to go home tonight, but while she liked his company she'd grown used to having the place to herself, and she couldn't sleep with his heavy presence in the bed.

Emily pulled a book down off the shelf, even though she didn't even have any candles left to read by. She'd just hold it in her lap and sit in her chair by the window and watch him sleep, and wait for the sun.

xx

End.


End file.
